Data Center Servers Exposed

Popular server firmware contains multiple zero-day vulnerabilities, but fixes are fraught with trade-offs.

You definitely don't want to show up on one of HD Moore's Internet scans. But some 35,000 -- and counting -- servers have been found exposed on the Internet by the renowned researcher and his team in their ongoing global scanning project aimed at detecting networked devices in danger of attack. In the latest twist, popular server firmware exposed on the Net also contains multiple zero-day bugs that leave corporate servers open to outside attackers.

The flaws were found in firmware version SMT_X9_226 of Supermicro's product, and Supermicro recently updated the firmware with version SMT_X9_315, which Rapid7 found only addresses some of the zero-days as well as some other flaws.